Spears: Canada far too optimistic on climate change action

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Environment Canada recently took five-and-a-half years to answer an Access to Information request from me, and a funny thing happened. The answer became more relevant with time, not less. Here’s why.

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In April of 2019, the federal government published a study showing that Canada’s climate is warming at about twice the speed of most countries. It wasn’t a big surprise: scientists have said for decades that climate change will be greatest in Earth’s far north and south. The study added fresh details to this.

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Then my boss asked me: Why are they releasing this study in the same week as the unpopular new carbon tax takes effect? Were they timing their science to justify an unpopular tax?

I paid my five bucks back in 2019 and asked for emails inside Environment Canada’s communications office about the study’s release.

The answer has finally arrived. It shows no political shenanigans, but something perhaps more disturbing. It shows optimism.

Too much blind optimism. And the five-year-old papers take on new relevance when seen through today’s eyes.

The 600 pages of emails leading up to the study’s release have all the usual planning: speeches, technical briefings, “infobytes” on Facebook and Twitter. All normal.

There are also suggestions on answering media questions. Among them, what if a reporter asks how Canada is doing with our commitment (made in 2015) to cut our greenhouse emissions by 30 per cent by 2030?

(Note: That was the target back then. The feds now promise to cut emissions by 40 to 45 per cent.)

The suggested response is where things get interesting:

“Canada is committed to meeting its Paris Agreement target by 2030. We have a plan to get us there.

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“Our climate action plan, the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change, includes over 50 concrete measures to reduce carbon pollution, foster clean technology solutions, and create good jobs that contribute to a stronger economy.”

And “Canada’s GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions in 2030 are expected to be 223 million tonnes lower than projected prior to the adoption” of this plan.

There’s even better news: “Additional reductions will come from measures that have not yet been modelled … ” These “will allow Canada to meet its 2030 target and position Canada to set and achieve deeper emission reduction” after 2030.

It’s resounding stuff, and important, if accurate. But I don’t think we’re getting anywhere near either the original target for 2030 or the current version.

Nine years into the plan, little to show

I’ve been covering environment news since 1988, the year when a famous international conference in Toronto, called The Changing Atmosphere, made greenhouse gases big news everywhere. I honestly can’t count the number of targets set up by cities, provinces and the feds since. And we’ve spectacularly missed each one. Not just missed, but flamed out. Remember the Kyoto Protocol, when our emissions went up, not down?

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And now? Nine years into our 15-year plan (2015 to 2030), we’ve nibbled away at emissions but are nowhere close to the target. By 2022 we cut our emissions by seven per cent, federal figures show.

Estimates say we likely reduced another percentage point in 2023. So even the original goal of 30 per cent is a long way off.

Yet here are documents talking down to us, not just promising to reach (and surpass) targets but dismissively shrugging off any suggestion that this may be harder than they think. They are selling the bear’s skin before catching the bear.

In 2019, I stood at a pre-election news conference where Catherine McKenna, environment minister at the time, explained that our switch from fossil fuels to cleaner electric power would parallel the cellphone revolution, making the Paris climate deal work. New technology would drive this. Details — the hard part — would come later. That’s always the way.

A few years back, a group that studies energy policy, led by Monica Gattinger at the University of Ottawa, published a paper on “dangerous optimism” — the tendency of governments to make climate commitments with no idea of how to reach them. I wish Canadian governments would stop this.

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A parallel thought: Let’s say a government is presented with two options — end all heart disease in two years for $10 billion, or take four years but save some money. What’s the right option? There isn’t one, because no one knows how to end all heart disease, and a cheque and a stupid schedule won’t change that.

A plan and a framework didn’t save the world at the Rio Summit (1992) or Kyoto (1997) or Copenhagen, Glasgow, Lima, Sharm El-Sheikh, Dubai and 20-plus other international promise-fests that followed, and they won’t now.

Show me you can do the job. Brag later.

Journalist Tom Spears is a former Ottawa Citizen environment reporter.

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